Charles Bean

By Ross Coulthart

Joint winner: Prize for Australian History, 2015 Prime Minister's Literary Awards 
 

This award-winning biography is a long overdue reassessment of the iconic Australian war correspondent

'The book I have enjoyed most in recent times has been Ross Coulthart's on the great war correspondent Charles Bean' - Peter FitzSimons, Sun Herald
 'Fascinating biography ... strongly recommend it'
Hon. Malcolm Turnbull via Twitter

Charles Bean's wartime reports and photographs mythologised the Australian soldier and helped spawn the notion that the Anzacs achieved something nation-defining on the shores of Gallipoli and the battlefields of western Europe. In his quest to get the truth, Bean often faced death beside the Diggers in the trenches of Gallipoli and the Western Front - and saw more combat than many. But did Bean tell Australia the whole story of what he knew? In this timely new biography, Ross Coulthart investigates the untold story behind Bean's jouralistic dilemma - his struggle to tell Australia the truth but also the pressure he felt to support the war and boost morale at home by suppressing what he'd seen.

'[Bean] had an obsession with recording the truth and Coulthart has lived up to his legacy in this superb biography' - Tim Hilferty, Adelaide Advertiser
'This is among the best biographies of an Australian historian available, fittingly released during the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the events Bean meticulously recorded.' - Justin Cahill, Booktopiablog

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781460700525

Ross Coulthart

Ross Coulthart is an award-winning investigative journalist and writer. Previously an investigative reporter on news and current affairs program 60 Minutes on Channel Nine and chief investigations reporter for the Sunday Night news program, Coulthart has won five prestigious Walkley journalism awards, including the most coveted top award for Australian journalism, the Gold Walkley. His broadcast television investigative journalism has also won the top broadcast award, a Logie. Ross is the co-author of bestselling books Dead Man Running and Above the Law, both exposes of organised crime in Australian and international outlaw motorcycle gangs, as well as Charles Bean, Lost Diggers, The Lost Tommys and Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow.

But of course they don’t – and can’t know.

BRITISH PRIME MINISTER LLOYD GEORGE, 1917

On a hot, dusty late afternoon in early May of 1915, an Australian brigadier general, James McCay, squats in a shallow ditch on a gentle slope overlooking the Turkish town of Krithia. As he watches, no doubt with mounting despair, dutiful lines of young Australian men are literally cut to pieces by Turkish machine guns and artillery right in front of him. Huddled at his side is a lanky bespectacled man dressed in a uniform designed to resemble the classic Norfolk officer’s jacket, who might pass for one of McCay’s subordinates but for the battered black notebook and pen he grasps, along with a telescope and camera case.

Despite his strong personal misgivings, McCay has been ordered with just half an hour’s warning to launch this insane attack on open ground in broad daylight. Before the war McCay was a prominent Melbourne lawyer, and served as both a Victorian and federal member of Parliament and even minister for defence. A contrarian thinker for his times, he was an early champion of women’s suffrage who once described war as an anachronism and even opposed the deployment of Victorian troops to the Boer War.¹ Now his sound reasons for scepticism about this impossible full-frontal attack are being underlined with the blood and cries of the men of his 2nd Australian Infantry Brigade.

But for the efforts of the man crouched beside McCay, the debacle of Krithia and its command blunders may well have stayed hidden forever on the battlefield. That man is Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, Australia’s official war correspondent throughout the First World War. Not only is his news account of the battle of Krithia a classic piece of war reporting, this unlikely hero – a lofty redhead nicknamed ‘Captain Carrot’ by the troops – is also about to demonstrate reckless bravery on the Turkish field. Bean has spotted a terribly wounded Allied soldier trying desperately to crawl back under withering fire, just a few metres in front of where Bean and the surviving Australian command are sheltering with British Lancashire Fusiliers troops in what will become known as Tommies’ Trench. It is a measure of Bean’s humility that while he records what he did that day in his personal diary, there will be no mention of it in the monumental twelve-volume official history of the First World War.² Under heavy fire, and against the orders of McCay sitting right beside him, Charles Bean runs out to bring the wounded soldier to safety:

. . . one could see that men had been knocked out – a good few of them. There was one chap I could see wounded about 20 yards to my right front – he was moving. I thought he would probably be hit again if he stayed out there, but the prospect of getting out and helping him in was not nice. However, I thought, if one gets into these positions in the firing line one must accept the consequences. I waited a bit and presently the youngster rolled over and began to painfully crawl in. One couldn’t stay any longer, so I nipped out of the trench and ran out to him and helped him back.³

When Bean gets back to the trench, McCay tells him: ‘Look here Bean, if you do any more of these damn fool actions I’ll send you straight back to H.Q. I’ve power to you know.’ Bean’s personal diary records that ‘[a] few minutes later, [McCay] was doing the dam’ fool action himself up on the parapet’.⁴ What follows is one of those breathtaking moments in warfare that leave one saddened by the folly of it all, but humbled by the sentiment and the sacrifice. Bean’s extraordinary account is one of the classics of Australians at arms. The brigadier general, realising his assault is losing momentum as hundreds of troops shelter in the same ditch from the concentrated Turkish fire, soon turns to Bean and says: ‘Well, Bean, I suppose this is where I have to do the damned heroic act.’⁵ Bean watches on, astonished, as McCay leaps up onto the side of the shallow trench in the direct line of fire and, looking down on the hundreds of Australians and British troops lying along its length, yells:

‘Now then Australians – which of you men are Australians? Come on Australians!’ The men jumped up – I suppose about 100 in this lot.

‘Come along Australians,’ they called – ‘Come on Australians.’

They picked themselves up, many with their rifles at the charge, and scrambled over the trench, over the Tommies’ heads, into a very heavy fire. The fire really was very heavy by now. It was knocking spurts of dust off the parapet into everyone’s face . . . But the Australians went on like a whirlwind.⁶

I heard one chap say: ‘Come on chaps. We’ve got to get it sometime. We can’t stay here always!’; and that was the spirit – that, and the feeling that being Australians they must get on. It was very fine to watch, and it was great to watch them as they went, absolutely unaffected by the bullets. I never saw one man whose manner was changed by them, except in that moment when they got up and faced them and rushed over the trench; then their faces were set, their eyebrows bent and they looked into it for a moment as men would into a dazzling flame – I never saw so many determined faces at once.⁷

McCay, who is shot in the thigh during the battle and sent to hospital in Cairo, will later write home to Australia that his rallying shout was in effect a call to the Australian boys to ‘come and die . . . but they came with a laugh and a cheer’.⁸ Bean’s account, run at length in Australian newspapers, is stirring stuff:

I have never read of anything finer in history than the way in which this disciplined, seasoned, trained Australian infantry went. They reckoned those bullets no more than if they were a summer shower. One youngster walked steadily into that storm with his entrenching spade held in his left hand a little in front of his face, and to one side, while he looked from under shelter of it exactly as a man looks round his umbrella when walking in the rain down a city street . . . There was an infinitely small pause as they started ahead in tense attitudes and very grim-set faces grasping their rifles and glaring into the unknown. I have seen men stand exactly so in battle pictures, and I wondered if men ever looked so in reality. Well the artists are not all wrong. The men stood there for a barely perceptible space and then with shouts of ‘Come along Australians’ swept like a hurricane across the deadly heath in front . . . The moment they left the trench, they began to fall – one here, another there – not thickly, but steadily.⁹

The Battle for Krithia was utterly futile. It achieved nothing, and it cost the Australians more than 1000 casualties – half of their number in this one charge – and it was all for naught. Krithia was never taken.

Charles Bean was conflicted in his role as a war correspondent because both the military and even his editors back home in Australia expected him to be a cheerleader for the war effort, that he should overlook the many mistakes made by its commanders that had sent far too many good men to needless deaths. Bean’s postwar official history was his effort to correct the wartime historical record that had been blighted by the jingoistic journalism of most of the wartime correspondents. In his history Bean endeavoured to truthfully write what he saw more often than not, no matter who of the top brass it offended. Granted, he did send first drafts of his chapters to some senior commanders but he didn’t always accept their suggested changes. So, during the battle at Krithia, he meticulously recorded for posterity, and eventual inclusion in his official history, the decisions made at command headquarters. His postwar history (but not his journalism during the war) notes how, immediately before the battle, some of the advisors to the British commander-in-chief of the Allied attack, General Sir Ian Hamilton, were telling Hamilton the force had done all it could, that further attack was hopeless.¹⁰ Objections had also earlier been raised about the whole notion of such a full-frontal attack in daylight, and even Hamilton had said he preferred to ‘cross the danger zone by night and overthrow the enemy in the grey dawn’.¹¹ But the British commander at Cape Helles from where the attack was launched, Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston – to become infamous as ‘the Butcher of Helles’ – pigheadedly opposed a night operation. When Hunter-Weston ordered the Krithia attack to resume that day at 5.30pm, he had ignored the frantic concerns of even his own subordinates that this could lead to the complete ‘destruction of his force’.¹² We know all of this because of Charles Bean, and what Bean subsequently wrote in his official history was unprecedented for the criticisms he was prepared to make of the command failures that allowed it to happen, although he did exculpate McCay. He criticised Hamilton for his self-serving decision to push on with the Krithia attack regardless when even his own advisers were telling him the situation was hopeless: ‘That failure he was unwilling yet to admit.’¹³ What Bean went to pains to record was that simply because a British general did not want to admit his attack on Krithia was doomed, he had ordered a pointless, near-suicidal attack by the Australians and New Zealanders. It is a measure of just how committed Bean was to his craft that he walked into battle with the Australians. It was a technique of firsthand observation he would employ at considerable peril throughout the war, unlike many of his professional colleagues who stayed well behind the lines.

Charles Bean’s writing was undoubtedly one of the sparks for Australia’s nascent nationalism in the early twentieth century. It was Bean who witnessed the rallying cry for ‘Australians’ to charge at Krithia, men who – until the mateship of battle – had more likely thought of themselves as British. Despite this significance, Bean’s huge contribution to Australian history is relatively unknown even today. Public antipathy about the First World War in the decades after it ended possibly played a large part in this – there was strong and bitter feeling even among some of the men who were there that the war had only served British imperial interests, and this feeling intensified during the austerity of the 1930s Depression. There was also a suspicion that writing like Bean’s journalism or his official history glorified the savage reality of the war, and there was an overwhelming public sentiment that people just wanted to forget and put the misery and suffering of war behind them. Indeed Bean was torn throughout his career by his fundamental obligation as a journalist and his role as Australia’s official correspondent, and eventually as the country’s official historian, where there was inevitable pressure from the military brass to present a rose-tinted critique of their role in the war. There would always be tension between what Bean saw as his sacred responsibility to tell the truth about the war and the pressure he and every other correspondent clearly felt to wave the flag for readers back home and boost the war effort. While other correspondents frequently dashed off often fictionalised tosh on their typewriters, Bean’s strain to meticulously record the truth as he saw it sometimes meant his reportage was less colourful than his more imaginative Fleet Street colleagues.

The evidence from Bean’s own diaries and letters suggests that he made a decision in 1917 to move away from his correspondent’s role and focus on his postwar official history, in part because he knew it was impossible to tell his readers the truth under the then censorship constraints, and the jingoism of his editors meant a more candid report would probably not be given a run anyway. Charles Bean did not want to be a ‘star’ news reporter if that meant compromising the truth. His densely detailed multi-volume official history – which he devoted most of his adult life to researching, writing and updating – sold well during his lifetime but its great historical importance has really only begun to be fully appreciated with the renaissance of public interest in the First World War in the last few decades since Bean’s death.

In the near century since Bean wrote the news articles, diaries and notebooks that, together with official records, formed the basis of his epic Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, he has more recently been widely eulogised as a fearless and groundbreaking war correspondent. In a recent speech by a defence minister, Bean was described as having ‘bravely and unflinchingly told the truth about war’.¹⁴ But the facts also show that like all journalists operating in a war zone, and despite having the best of intentions, Charles Bean did not always tell the whole story of what he saw. He had to make constant compromises about what he could write, not always because of legitimate operational security concerns but because he did not want to jeopardise his access to the ongoing news stories he was writing as a journalist. Bean was also compromised by his own class and social prejudices, which in hindsight can seem quite xenophobic and blinkered but were commonly held in his day. He was one of the first journalists to cover a conflict as what is today termed an embedded correspondent, and the experiences he witnessed and how he reported them are as relevant now as they were a century ago.

Much has been made of the fact that when he came to write his official history, Charles Bean extracted the Australian government’s agreement that he would suffer no censorship of it, and that was the case. But Bean’s history was written after the war, and there is good reason to question why Bean chose, particularly during the war, but also in part after the war, not to report to his readers much of the incompetence and bungling by Allied senior command that he witnessed. Charles Bean’s wartime reports mythologised the Australian soldier, and fired the notion that the Anzacs achieved something nation-defining on the shores of Gallipoli and the battlefields of Western Europe, and Bean also found himself under extraordinary pressure to conform to a tradition of war correspondents who were generally expected to boost the war effort. One of his much-hailed British contemporaries, Philip Gibbs, penned a nauseatingly positive account of the Allies’ disastrous first day on the Somme with the deceitful line: ‘And, so, after the first day of battle, we may say: It is on balance a good day for Britain and France.’¹⁵ But Gibbs subsequently had the decency to admit the dirty secret of war correspondence: ‘We identified ourselves absolutely with the armies in the field . . . There was no need of censorship of our despatches. We were our own censors.’¹⁶ British Prime Minister Lloyd George later admitted that when he heard Gibbs’ more truthful private account of the disastrous British battle losses he had witnessed, Lloyd George realised that if the public was actually told the truth about what was really happening they would never support the war:

I listened last night . . . to the most impressive and moving description from him of what the war in the West really means, that I have heard. Even an audience of hardened politicians and journalists was strongly affected. If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship would not pass the truth.¹⁷

There is a lot of evidence in Bean’s favour to show that he did as good a job as he was allowed to do. He was extraordinarily brave and was recommended for decorations for the risks he took to rescue wounded soldiers under fire. Bean was also a victim of unjustified official censorship in his dispatches during the war, and the key to Charles Bean is that the inner turmoil he felt about the truths he could not tell during the war was resolved, most of the time, by detailing what really happened in his diaries and notebooks, as deliberate research for his postwar history. Repeatedly throughout Bean’s reportage, there are traces of the journalistic compromises he made to avoid clashing with the commanders who gave him such unhindered access to the frontlines. If Bean had one significant flaw it was his overzealous, albeit laudable, desire to see Australia’s role and sacrifice in the war properly acknowledged, which sometimes made Bean selectively blind to the failings of the Australian commanders he inevitably became close to as he followed them from Gallipoli through the key battles of the Western Front. This blind spot is clear even in what he wrote in the Official History of Australia in the War.

Bean realised very early in his time as a correspondent that there were all too many truths and realities about this war that would never escape the censor’s pencil. During the same battle of Krithia where he risked his life in Tommies’ Trench with McCay, Bean’s private diary recorded details of horrific suffering that were a long way from his news story portraying soldiers advancing as if in a summer shower:

I saw one poor devil, out of the hundreds who were lying there, trying to get back to cover. I asked if I could help him – he was hit through the leg, high up and was crawling. We went some way together, limping – he in great pain, when he fell saying ‘Oh God – oh Christ – oh it’s awful’. He had been hit a second time through same leg or other leg. I asked if he could still come on. ‘Oh no – no, I can’t,’ he said. The plateau was very exposed, so I simply dragged him by both legs, he consented, into the nearest thing to a dimple in the ground that I could find – got hold of two packs and put them round him and left him . . . I don’t fancy he can have lived – poor chap.¹⁸

The news journalism that Charles Bean produced at the time on the Krithia operation did not convey to his Australian readers the full tragedy and squandering of life that it truly represented. Bean’s subsequent article says of the same battle that, after one advance, the Australians came through ‘without a man hurt’, but acknowledges ‘of course some must have suffered’.¹⁹ But his diary records how Brigadier General McCay had privately acknowledged to him that the Krithia assault was a pointless waste because the task set for the Australian troops was ‘impossible’.²⁰ None of this made it into Bean’s frontline reportage because it would have been censored even if he had tried to write it; the commanders took the view that anything that undermined public morale and support for the war should be censored.

But even after the war ended Bean chose not to air McCay’s damning admission in his official history. Bean was perhaps conflicted by his own concerns about McCay’s leadership on the day, realising that part of the blame for the disaster must lie with McCay for not questioning the daylight attack more aggressively with his commanders. These doubts Bean expressed privately in a 1927 letter about McCay’s ‘excitability and of the foolish extravagance which robbed him of the respect of the men he led’.²¹ He also described McCay in his private diary in 1918 as ‘wildly unpopular throughout the AIF’.²² Bean’s official history did eventually record that some of McCay’s own men believed he was responsible for the heavy casualties at Krithia because they felt he should have insisted more strongly on a night attack.²³ But, as he did so often with the Australian commanders in his history, Charles Bean spared McCay by not repeating his harsher private criticisms:

In each of the Anzac brigades one ill result was a growing conviction that they had been needlessly sacrificed; in the case of the 2nd Brigade, the blame quickly, but quite wrongly, settled upon McCay. He had, it is true, driven his troops hard, and perhaps too swiftly for good order; in personally directing almost every company he had put needless pressure upon eager men. These things lost him the popularity which his great personal bravery might have gained. But the plan of attack was not his. He but vigorously carried out his part of the plans for the Second Battle of Krithia, which, limiting themselves almost to the routine of an Aldershot field-day, in three days expended an army in merely approaching the enemy.²⁴

Bean’s actual journalism was often highly sanitised of his private harsher criticisms. His May 1915 dispatch of McCay’s heroics at Krithia for Australian and British newspapers reads like an Empire-era boy’s own annual, glorifying the bravery of the Australians but ignoring completely the command failures that sent so many fine soldiers to a forlorn, unnecessary, and often agonising death:

I have seen many troops at work during the last week [but] I never saw anything approaching the swiftness or the dash of that advance . . . They were in high spirits, laughing and yarning over all sorts of things – what the people in Australia were thinking, the incidents of the day, of the landing, every sort of topic except the charge they had just made.²⁵

It may be a controversial view, given the low stock in which journalists are generally held today, but it would be unthinkable for a contemporary journalist not to attempt to aggressively report on how such a classic failure in military command had caused the unnecessary deaths of so many young soldiers, irrespective of the military censorship that would seek to suppress it. Judged by the journalistic standards of his day, however, Bean was considerably less jingoistic and much more committed to the truth than most of his colleagues. In truth, just as embedded correspondents in conflicts across the globe do today, Bean compromised on what he told his Australian readers. As a journalist he never once acknowledged what he wrote privately in his diaries of ‘the utter hopeless wastefulness of this whole war’.²⁶ It was Charles Bean who glorified the Anzac soldier as demonstrating ‘reckless valour in a good cause’,²⁷ but he made little or, more often than not, no acknowledgement of the hundreds of Australians whom history records deserted their posts and refused to waste their lives on a British imperial command strategy of bloody attrition. His detractors, like historian Charles Manning Clark, believed writing such as his was jingoistic, making Australia ‘a prisoner of her past’.²⁸ Bean has been accused of generalising from the personal stories of extraordinary individual soldiers to fit his mythological image of the digger as somehow superhuman.

During the war, Bean knew he needed to stay onside with the sources he was cultivating, and this coloured his reportage. He was a contemporary of the same English public school as Allied generals Haig and Birdwood, and he was heavily influenced by his later childhood and early adult years in England. Bean’s notions of the heroic Australian stockman were formed in the prewar years when he finally returned to Australia and befriended writers such as A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson. Bean also notoriously allowed anti-Semitism to colour his impressions of the man who turned out to be Australia’s most effective general, Sir John Monash (a failing he acknowledged much later in his life). And the notion he pushed in his writing of a unique democratic kinship between Australian officers and their men in battle was soon dispelled postwar when Bean came to distrust the unions and the socialist/communist movement in Australia. As one academic analysis has ventured about two former prime ministers of Australia, ‘Keating quotes Manning Clark but never Charles Bean, and Howard quotes Bean but never Clark.’²⁹

Despite these flaws, what is special about Charles Bean is that he generally lived by a credo of truth and honesty that few other correspondents of his generation heeded. More a chronicler than a journalist, Bean made it his role to visit every battle scene as close as possible to the moment it happened, and often during a battle. He soon realised the folly of waiting behind the lines to be spoon fed the day’s events by propaganda officers from military intelligence at command HQ. He strived to get firsthand accounts of battles from the men who had just fought in them – and that is what set him apart from his peers. Charles Bean was driven by a strong desire to ensure the sacrifice of so many young soldiers whom he knew, deeply admired and all too often watched die or suffer grievous wounds was not for nothing. His determination to record the feats of the Australian fighting soldier was to culminate in not only one of the most extraordinary official war histories ever written but also in the conception and creation of one of the world’s great war memorials.

One

PLAY UP AND PLAY THE GAME!

Without the Empire we should be tossed like a cork in the cross current of world politics. It is at once our sword and our shield.

BILLY HUGHES, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER 1915–23

English supremacy should last until the end of time because it means universal freedom, universal liberty, emancipation from everything degrading.

ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER 1873–78

It was a very different time, the era into which Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean was born in Bathurst, country New South Wales, on 18 November 1879. Just three years earlier, Queen Victoria had been declared Empress of India, a meaningless title crafted by the then British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, as an act of craven flattery to his monarch, but significant for the fact that it was the moment England first acknowledged itself as an empire – Victoria was queen of an imperial empire that had painted a swathe of British pink right across the world map.

Despite their distance from ‘home’, the respectable citizenry of Bathurst saw themselves as British to their bootstraps. In the books and newspapers that young Charles read, and the social circles that his parents moved in, the British Empire was still seen as mythically great, and it was truly the white man’s burden to keep order, peace and good government among the citizens, colonists, heathens and natives across England’s territories. To be British was to be superior and, above all, to be inculcated with a strong sense of duty and responsibility.

‘We are called upon to rule [the colonies], as far as we do rule them, not for our glory but their happiness,’ the English novelist Anthony Trollope wrote in 1873, credulously extolling the virtues of British colonisation.¹ For generations of privileged young Englishmen, aside from family, the primary place where most of them were indoctrinated with the sense of imperial duty and obligation that saw them sent off as officers and bureaucrats to run the Empire was the English public school system. Confusingly named (and so known because anyone could apply, regardless of where they lived or their religion), these privately run establishments exploded in popularity in Victorian England, first with Thomas Arnold’s Rugby school and then a plethora of establishments servicing the British elite. They imbued students with notions of muscular Christianity and a competitive sporting spirit, which produced fine fodder for the military and the colonial service. Charles Bean’s father, Edwin, devoted his life in Australia to emulating the best qualities of the British public school system from which he came, with Thomas Arnold’s public school humanitarian ideals as his guide, and this was a huge formative influence on the young Charles.

Edwin was indeed to be a constant benevolent and moral influence throughout his son’s life. In a short biography Charles Bean wrote for his new wife in 1924 when he was threatened with ill health, Charles went to great pains to ensure she and future biographers knew how important his father had been to him, crediting Edwin with much of his early learning.² There was always a firm culture of diary and record keeping in the Bean family; when Edwin went on a visit to New Zealand in 1885 he kept a fastidious diary of everything he saw from the moment he left Bathurst and boarded a steamship across the Tasman, including a lovely description of the Blue Mountains: ‘Soon we approach the ranges that stand back from the plain like wild things gazing suspiciously at man’s civilization.’³ Diary keeping was a habit he clearly passed on to his son, whose meticulous notebooks and diaries were to eventually provide the backbone of the official war history. Charles’ mother, Lucy, was no slouch either, in August 1886 beginning a small diary for ‘Charlie Bean’ when he was nearly seven years old, which he treasured and later added to throughout his life.

Edwin Bean arrived in Australia from England in 1874 when he was 22, having not scored highly enough in either his Oxford University results or Indian civil service examinations to secure a place in the colonial service that would have allowed him to follow in his own father’s footsteps. John Bean was a surgeon in the East India Company and a surgeon major in the British Army in India, where Edwin was born in 1851. As was the custom of the day, Edwin was sent back to England at the age of six to board at Somerset College in Bath and then to the newly opened Clifton College in Bristol, one of the original 26 British public schools. Clifton, which also featured prominently in his son Charles’s life, is resonant with the history of that era of imperial England. Its cricket ground, known as ‘The Close’, is where Sir Henry Newbolt based his preposterously blood-soaked ode ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (which translates as ‘They pass on the torch of life’):

There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –

Ten to make and the match to win –

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

An hour to play and the last man in.

And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,

Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,

But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote

‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

The sand of the desert is sodden red, –

Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –

The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,

And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

The river of death has brimmed his banks,

And England’s far, and Honour a name,

But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:

‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’⁴

To this day, boys at Clifton remove their hats as they walk through a solemn memorial arch in the school grounds dedicated to the teachers and pupils who died in both world wars. It is not difficult to understand the crushing sense of imperial duty that both Bean father and son felt as alumni of Clifton.

After arriving in New South Wales, the young Edwin took a job at Sydney Grammar School as a teacher of classics before marrying Lucy Butler, the daughter of a well-known Tasmanian legal family, in 1877. They first lived at ‘Stowell’ in Ocean Street, Woollahra, and then moved to Bathurst in January 1878 when Edwin took up the position of headmaster at the recently established All Saints’ College. It was a busy time for the young newlyweds, and for Lucy, who was pregnant when the couple arrived in Bathurst, it would have been a terrible strain arriving in the sweltering and dusty country town at the height of an Australian summer. As well as getting the house ready for a new baby, she was also the housemother for the students.

Lucy and Edwin’s first child, Madeline Jessie, was born on 4 May 1878. It is likely that Edwin and Lucy took their baby daughter for a Christmas visit with the Butlers in Hobart and, tragically, during this visit eight-month-old Madeline Bean became ill with meningitis. The young couple did not get to return to Bathurst with their baby daughter, the Hobart Mercury newspaper death notice grimly recording her passing on 8 January 1879.

About ten months later on 18 November 1879, Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean was born at the family’s residence at All Saints’ College, Bathurst. Having lost her firstborn, Lucy Bean was understandably anxious at times during Charles’s early life, particularly when he suffered a fever at fourteen months that was very similar to the symptoms of little Madeline’s fatal illness – almost exactly two years since her death; the threat to infants from diseases such as meningitis in this era without antibiotics was very real. There were to be two more sons, John (also known as Jack) in 1881 and Montague (called Monty and later Tig) in 1884.

Edwin’s appointment as headmaster at All Saints’ was a risky move for the young couple because the fledgling school’s future depended wholly on his ability to attract students, but it was a welcome country change after Sydney. Bathurst was a large town then, built on the 1850s gold-mining boom, and as one of the richer towns of country New South Wales it already had a Catholic school, St Stanislaus’ College. All Saints’ was the Church of England’s pitch for the hearts and minds of Bathurst’s Anglican congregation, founded with the support of Bishop Marsden, a fellow former Trinity College graduate with Edwin Bean. Marsden’s grandfather was the legendary Reverend Samuel Marsden, who is perhaps unkindly remembered as the ‘flogging parson’, well known for his intense dislike of Irish Catholics and his aggressive introduction of Christianity to the New Zealand Maori. His namesake grandson was reportedly a more conciliatory character, and he no doubt appointed Edwin Bean because he knew the school needed an energetic leader to convince the local landed gentry to send their sons to this new church school. The headmaster did not disappoint: it was Edwin Bean’s eleven years as headmaster that transformed the school into a highly respected institution.

Lucy Bean’s diary intimates a warm and loving family life: ‘The getting out of your cots in the morning, (you, Charlie always first awake) after morning kiss to sleepy Father and Mother, the scamper down the passage in your little flannel combinations to the nursery.’⁵ She describes an idyllic life in Bathurst for Charles and his brothers of outdoor games – football, cricket, horses, digging in the garden and swinging on a horizontal bar. Early on, Jack told ‘Chas’, as he called his older brother, that he should be a war correspondent because that was the job that suited him.⁶ As a teenage schoolboy Charles was intensely interested in the British forces; he subscribed to Army and Navy, an illustrated service magazine. According to Jack, ‘Charlie knew the tonnage and gunnage of the various ships of war to a nicety and the meaning and make-up of the various naval flags.’⁷ Charles also loved sketching, even drawing in his hymnbooks during church.

As Bean later recounted in a personal history for his future wife, Effie, it was a matter of great pride in the family that a fictionalised account of an incident involving Bean’s uncle, Henry Woodrow, was featured in the famous 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days by socialist reformer Thomas Hughes.⁸ In the book, the implausibly decent hero, Tom, here based on Woodrow, stands up for a younger lad who is being bullied by a senior school brute for kneeling beside his dormitory bed to say his evening prayers. The book is set at the famous Rugby public school at the time when the real-life Thomas Arnold was headmaster and it presents an idealised view of English public school life, young gentlemen triumphing over cads and bullies and developing into adult men of good character and selflessness with a hefty dose of Christian morality. Arnold’s views were to become a constant guide throughout Bean’s private and public life and they undoubtedly had a huge influence on his notions of Australian mateship and selflessness. This idea of moral character in leadership dominated Charles Bean’s thinking through his life, especially his idealised war accounts of Australian officers selflessly leading their men into battle.

Three young boys born in just five years no doubt kept Lucy Bean busy, and because she also had enormous obligations helping Edwin run All Saints’ the family hired nannies and governesses. Lucy Bean’s diary remembered Charles’s nanny, Esther Johns – ‘Kind old Nursie’ – with great affection; she had taught him how to recite the alphabet backwards at the age of three and a half. At the age of about five or six years old, Bean began at the new preparatory school his father had created at All Saints’. He won a book prize for his schoolwork – The Golden Treasury of Oxford Verse – and it is an indication of his archivist tendencies that decades later Bean still had the no doubt slightly battered book of verse and loaned it to his work colleague Arthur Bazley, for his children.

Bathurst was a railway hub and farming service town, as it is today, with a rich history of convicts and bushrangers that no doubt fired the imagination of young Charles and his brothers. A huge part of Edwin Bean’s job was to tour the local farms touting for students, particularly when the first state-run school was proposed for Bathurst as a result of the 1880 education reforms, which saw the state assume responsibility for public education, and All Saints’ enrolment numbers came under considerable pressure. It also took a heavy toll on Edwin Bean’s health, and a propitious bequest from his father in 1882 made it possible for him and Lucy to take a break, returning to England in early 1883 to sort out his estate, leaving the boys with their nanny.

Charles loved the community of school life at All Saints’. The boarders who attended became extended members of the Bean family and, as he later told his wife, Effie, one of his great pleasures right through his life was to read the school magazine, The Bathurstian, to catch up on school happenings and the latest updates on old boys with whom he shared so many happy school years. It was also at Bathurst that Bean began a lifelong love of cricket.

One of the most intriguing characters in Charles Bean’s life at this time was Arthur Wilberforce Jose, the son of an English merchant who came to Australia when the family’s fortune was lost. Only 22 when he was appointed as a master at All Saints’, Jose had met Edwin in Hobart when the Beans were visiting Lucy’s family. Descended from Spaniards who settled in Cornwall, he was briefly a student at Oxford but, after the loss of the family money, he knocked back the offer of a dull clerical position in Bristol to ‘go bush’ travelling Australia – a proto-British backpacker. By the time he met Edwin while tutoring in Hobart, Jose had lived rough across Victoria and Tasmania, picking fruit, working as a fencing contractor and hacking lumber for the railways. Like so many backpackers of today, Jose had a huge love of Australia, especially the bush, and he filled young Charles’s head with perhaps his first sense of pride in being distinctively Australian and not just of Mother England. Jose went on from Bathurst to an illustrious career on a path not dissimilar to Charles’s own, studying at the bar then becoming a writer. One of his books, The Growth of the Empire⁹, first published in 1900, lauded the British Empire and championed the White Australia policy, and in 1899 Jose went to South Africa as a war correspondent. The two were to stay friends throughout their lives and also worked professionally together when in 1920 Jose was hired by Bean to write the official history of the Australian navy’s role in the First World War.

Charles Bean did not write as much about his mother’s influence as he did of Edwin’s guidance, but much later in his life he acknowledged just how important a mother’s role was: ‘Each young Australian in his life passes through two great schools of character. The first is his home. The second is his school, college, or apprenticeship. The greatest factor in all education (in spite of all other set ideas about it) is the home, and beyond question a boy or girl’s greatest educator is their mother.’¹⁰ In the diary she kept for her son, Lucy set out the seeds of Charles Bean’s moral code, an Anglican morality and a strong conviction that her son commit himself to an honourable life where he told the truth without fear or favour: ‘I do not want to see you a rich man, or a man holding a leading position, so much as to see you a good, charitable man.’¹¹

But money was a constant worry for Lucy and Edwin as All Saints’ enrolments came under pressure after the establishment of a state high school in Bathurst. Edwin had campaigned against the education reforms which brought in the state schools, arguing instead for a scheme of subsidies and scholarships to private schools, and his fears were well-founded: enrolments at All Saints’ were going backwards by 1886. Edwin began an aggressive marketing strategy, visiting the families of prospective All Saints’ students in the local area, and in the end his persistence won the day – the new Bathurst high school was eventually closed. By the end of 1889 Edwin Bean had managed to triple enrolments at All Saints’ but, exhausted from overwork, he and Lucy decided to take the family on an extended break back to England. Edwin had the money to travel because he had prudently purchased a substantial number of shares in the massive Illawarra coal deposits near Wollongong which by the 1890s were returning a healthy income on his investment. It seems very likely that Edwin Bean was not just tired but had suffered a nervous breakdown at this time, for his plan was to take the next two years to rest in Europe with his wife and family.

In early 1889 the Bean family, including nanny Esther Johns, left Bathurst for England, and, as fate would have it, Edwin and Lucy would not return to Australia for more than two decades. They sailed on the P&O steamer Valetta, a journey that delighted the nine-year-old Charles Bean, who loved playing with the younger children on the ship. As Charles would later acknowledge to his wife Effie, it was in England where he and his brother got the bulk of their education: ‘When we left to go back to England, I was fairly well on, but not in any way a marvel of learning or industry.’¹²

Charles and his family were devoted Anglophiles even before they left Australia, but the time he would spend as an older child and then a young man in England formed him for much of his early life and career. The boy who arrived on the dockside in England in 1889 unquestioningly thought of himself as British, thrilled by her imperial might and notions of British racial superiority and purity. Despite this, what is intriguing about Charles Bean is how his personal life story tracks the very origins of Australian nationalism. Over the following